Shadow Selves
by the.eye.does.not.SEE
Summary: "Did we ever talk about kids, did we want them?" Jane and Oscar have a conversation about the past.
**A/N** : I think I legitimately thrive on O's pain, because I got this prompt on tumblr and I actually grinned. (I am such a monster.) Everything in this story has been in my O headcanon since the second he first popped up in Jane's memories, and so I'm glad I have an excuse to play it out in full form here. Please enjoy.

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They had been playing twenty questions for the better part of an hour when she asked what would end up being the final question. It was Sunday, just a few minutes past noon, but it was dim in her bedroom, with the shades closed to keep out the too-bright spring sun. He was sitting cross-legged on her bed, flipping through her journal of tattoo drawings, and she had her head resting on one of his knees, staring up at him, and the ceiling, as she toyed absentmindedly with the chain he kept around his neck, and the charms he'd hung there a year ago: their dog tags, their diamond ring. A few seconds ago, he had pushed her bothersome hands away, equating her to a baby with a mobile as she'd fiddled with the necklace swinging above her head. His comment had made her smile, and tug teasingly on the necklace in retribution, and then it had made her think.

"Did we ever talk about kids, did we want them?"

The question came out of nowhere, and so she expected to have to watch him brace himself. She expected to watch him put the journal down, to expel a heavy breath, to close his eyes and think. It was a serious question, she knew, and so she expected his reply to be an ordeal, perhaps for both of them. But he didn't even blink at the question, didn't even pause before answering.

"Nope," he said at once, not taking his eyes off the journal.

She frowned at his quick, calm reply, her eyes zeroing in on his face above hers. It wasn't often that he gave her information so readily, nor in such a detached manner. Unconsciously, her hand tightened around the necklace dangling above her. "Nope, we didn't talk about them, or nope, we didn't want them?" she asked slowly, watching his face closely for clues.

He turned a page in the journal, scratched the side of his face. "Both, I guess," he replied after a moment, shrugging.

"'Both, I guess'?" Jane couldn't help but laugh at his impassive answer. Her hand on the necklace loosened, and then fell into his lap. "Seriously, Oscar? You expect me to buy that?"

"What?" He shrugged again, glancing down at her only briefly before turning back to the journal.

She rolled her eyes at his nonchalance, scoffing. "Well, come on. We were engaged, we were supposed to get married, and—what? We somehow just _never_ had a conversation about kids? Not once?"

"We had more important things to have conversations about," he replied easily, his focus solely on the journal once more. He sounded like an automaton when he spoke, and Jane only barely resisted the urge to elbow him hard in the ribs to force some life into him. It wasn't like him, to be so distant. At least not these past few weeks.

So she tried a different tact. "What about us now?" she asked, taking the charms of the necklace in hand again and pressing them gently against his bare chest.

"What about us now?" he repeated.

"Well…" She shifted her head on his leg to catch his eye better. "Shouldn't we have a conversation about kids? We are having regular sex," she pointed out.

He nodded without meeting her eyes. "Yes, and we're using regular protection," he replied, turning another page in the journal. "So nobody's getting pregnant."

She wondered if the tone of finality in his voice was because he wanted this conversation to be over, or because he wanted to control the situation. Either way, it didn't matter. She wasn't going to drop this topic, and he couldn't control every moment of his life.

"What would you do if I _did_ get pregnant?" she asked.

His eyes flickered to hers for just a moment, concerned, anxious. She could see the fear there, just before he quashed it. "Well, I'm sure we would—"

Jane shook her head against his leg. "No, Oscar, I didn't ask what _we_ would do. I asked what _you_ would do."

He frowned, his attention fully on her now. "What kind of a question is that?"

"An honest one," she replied. She pushed herself up out of his lap, and came to sit beside him. She took the journal out of his hands, so he couldn't pretend to be occupied with something else while they talked about this, and set it aside. "Would you leave?" she asked him, point-blank. "Would you run if I came to you and told you—"

"I am not in the habit of abandoning you," he interrupted sharply. There was something angry in his voice that made her stop what she had been thinking about. Something angry in his voice that made it sound like he had said such a thing to her before.

She stared at him hard, her mind weaving through possibilities, searching for the truth of the past in his face, and he stared back, defiant, unwilling to let her breach. Frustrated at his defenses, her stare turned to a glare, turned to a fury, turned to a fire—

And then it blew out, all at once. Because she had seen a twitch on his face. She had seen a flash in his eyes. And she _knew_.

The damning truth came out in a hush, like a prayer:

"We have a child together, don't we? Somewhere out there in the world?"

He shook his head vigorously, as if she were a fly buzzing about his ears, before he pushed himself up to his knees, and then off of her bed. "No, we do not," he said firmly, as he got to his feet and he put his back to her.

"Yes, we _do_ ," she called, crawling after him, slipping her feet down onto the floor as well. "I know we do; I saw your face, I know—"

"You know _what_?"

He whirled around on her so fast, so fiercely, that she actually jumped back.

"What the hell do you _think_ you know, Jane?" he demanded.

He did not take a single step towards her, did not make a single move towards her, but still, she found herself shrinking back. The knowledge was there for the taking, she knew. She could see it in his face; she could sense it in his fury. It was hers to have—but she'd have to fight him to get to it. She would have to tear him open.

She looked at him standing before her, his eyes wide and bright with anger, his jaw tight with forced control, his lips pressed together so hard they barely had any color left. She looked at him standing before her, half-naked, and she remembered how gentle he'd been with her, earlier this morning, when they'd made love with the dawn, and then fallen asleep, and then made love again when the midmorning sun woke them. She looked at him standing before her, and she knew she needed to have her answers before they so much as held hands again. No matter what happened to them as a result, she had to know. She could no longer continue in blissful ignorance.

"Tell me what happened to the child we had," she ordered. She could feel her hands start to shake at all the possibilities— _Was it still alive? Dead? Did it know about her?—_ but her voice remained strong, clear. When he said nothing in reply, and only clamped his mouth harder shut, she felt the anger boil over. How dare he hide this from her, as if it weren't hers too, made of _her_ flesh and blood?

She rushed him, reaching for that chain around his neck. She tangled a hand around it and attempted to rip it off his neck, but it didn't work. The chain was too strong. So she did the next best thing, and she shoved it against his heart as hard as she could, snarling, "If this means anything to you, anything more than an ornament, _tell me what happened_."

She watched him stand before her and struggle for words. She watched his eyes dart, watched his chin shake and then freeze. She watched him close his eyes and suck in a breath.

"Nothing," he whispered finally, his eyes still closed.

" _What_?" she hissed, pressing the metal charms harder against his chest. She hoped the diamonds tore through his skin. "What does that mean?"

His eyes flashed open. "It means what it means: _Nothing_! Nothing happened to it, nothing—"

"Stop lying!" She shoved him harder, with both hands now, so that he stumbled back against the wall. "Stop it! I am sick of you ly—"

" _I am not lying_!" he shouted back. But it was not the volume of his volume of his voice that made her flinch and fall back, but the brokenness of it. His voice had cracked with the words; she'd heard it, and now she could see it, in his eyes.

"Nothing happened to it," she whispered slowly, repeating his words, hearing them anew now as her hands fell from his chest. The charms on his necklace clinked against one another once they were released. There were indeed a few specks of red on his chest, where the ring, driven by her force, had made him bleed. But he did not seem to notice, or care, and she could not take her eyes off of his face. Her brain was working too fast, and not fast enough. "What… What does that mean?" she whispered, backing away, and then stopping, freezing still a mere foot from him. "So did it… Did it die?"

"In a manner of speaking, yes," he snapped. And then, quieter: "And in a manner of speaking, no."

Jane blinked, staring at him, not sure she could believe what he was trying to put into words. Part of her knew exactly what he was saying. Part of her had known for minutes, or for hours; part of her had always been wise to this. But the other, foolish, impetuous part of her had known. Had not wanted to know. Still did not want to know.

"We…" She tried for words whose meaning she could not fully understand. "Are you saying we—"

"I am saying we had more important things to do than be parents," he interrupted quietly, his dark eyes meeting hers. "We had our futures planned out already, dangerous futures. We had important jobs to do, and there was no room for—"

"How far along was I when it was terminated?"

Because that's what had happened, she knew it instinctively. It hadn't been a miscarriage; it hadn't been a stillbirth. It had been a half-life, extinguished before it entered the world. It had not died, exactly, because it hadn't ever really been alive. Nothing had happened to it because it had not yet been real.

Or so he told himself.

Oscar held her eyes, pausing only a moment, as if to gauge that she really wanted to know. Then he said quietly, "You were pregnant for about a month and a half. Just at six weeks." His voice rose to a normal level: "So it wasn't anything at that point, you know. It wasn't—"

"It was a baby," she whispered. She could feel her head getting heavy, her thoughts slowing, her entire being fixating on this one truth: "It was _our_ baby."

"It wasn't any bigger than a couple grains of rice," he replied. His voice had taken on that detached, automaton-esque quality again. And he had stopped looking at her.

She took one step closer to him, but slow this time. Careful.

"You like to lie to yourself, don't you?" she asked softly.

"It isn't lying, it's fact," he snapped. "Look it up. A six-week fetus is nothing. It doesn't even have a face. Its limbs aren't even—"

"I don't care about those facts right now," she replied, moving forward again. When she was close enough, she lifted a hand to touch him, to grab onto his arm. He did not flinch as she expected him to. But he felt so far away, at this point, that she worried nothing she could say or do would actually reach him. "Talk to me," she whispered. When he turned his head away, she ran her hand down his arm, and twined their fingers together. His hand was motionless in hers. Lifeless. "Please talk to me, tell me what this means. Please don't shut me out. Oscar—"

"I don't want to talk about it," he cut in in a whisper. "Don't you get that?" He turned and met her eye, and she saw his were red at the corners. "Don't make me talk about this with you," he begged. "Please."

She swallowed hard, her whole throat protesting the movement. She could feel tears growing in her, too. She whispered his name, and started to reach for him with her other hand, but his came up to catch hers before she could move it much. She started at the touch, terrified that he'd shove her away, that he'd run as she'd feared, that they'd go back to being nothing more than distant acquaintances again with murky pasts. But he didn't refuse her. Instead, he brought her hand to his face, pressed it to his lips, and kissed the palm gently.

With his other hand entwined with hers, he tugged her closer, until their chests were touching; his bare, hers in a loose t-shirt. The few drops of blood she'd drawn from him stained the white of her shirt, but she didn't complain. She didn't care, not when he was this close. He bent his head to hers.

"Please," he whispered, "let's let the past be, okay, Jane? Let's just move on."

"How?" she whispered back, lifting herself up on her toes to press her forehead hard into his. She stared at him, too, but he had his eyes firmly shut, blocking her out. He was trying to fly away, she knew. Trying to separate himself, the way he did whenever she got too close. Well, she would not allow him, not this time. She shook off his hands and cupped his face, firmly enough so that he opened his eyes. "How do you expect us to move on when we're still the same?" she asked. "How can you possibly think that we can just push this aside and go on with our lives—" She felt a rush of nausea, suddenly cognizant of how close she was to him, of how half-dressed he was, of how they had made love in this room twice in the last twelve hours… Her hands shook and fell and she backed away from him, as if from an apparition. "How can you even…" She swallowed hard, remembering how he had been the one to rouse her this morning, the one to put his lips on her neck, the one to whisper _Awake yet?_ in her ear as he'd pulled her back into him, smiling when she'd laughed and said _Well, I guess I am now_.

"How can you even look at me right now?" she choked out. "How can you—How—" She stumbled back until her legs hit the bed, and then she sank, dropping like a stone through still air. "How can you have sex with me," she whispered, in equal parts fear and awe, "and not think of that baby we gave up—of _everything_ we gave up?"

He smiled briefly without humor, and stepped forward to kneel by her feet. He did not touch her, and she was grateful for this. No, she was disappointed; she wanted his hands on her. No, she wanted him out of the room. She wanted—

So many things, she wanted. But there was nothing she wanted more than to know what _he_ wanted.

"You know something," he murmured, "for all the bad rap it gets, compartmentalization truly is a magnificent feature of the human psyche."

She stared down at him, a frown pinching the skin between her eyebrows. She had heard that word before— _compartmentalization_. Borden had used it in one of her sessions, ages ago. He had likened her memory trauma to a chemical version of the practice: a simulated and nearly permanent defense mechanism that blocked out all past trauma and feeling, and allowed her to live a second, split, life.

"You shouldn't be doing that," she whispered to Oscar. "It isn't good for you."

He smiled. "Isn't that a bit like the pot calling the kettle black?" When she frowned, not understanding the phrase, he took pity and spoke plainly for once: "I'm calling you a hypocrite."

"But I'm not compart—"

He raised his eyebrows, as if to say _Really?_ , and she fell bitterly silent.

"I'm not doing it on purpose! I—the me now—did not ask for this," she struggled to explain. "I didn't ask for any of this. I didn't ask to be split in two; I don't ask to have that—that other self."

"I know," he said quietly, nodding in agreement. "And you know what? The me now didn't ask for any of those things, either—not for you, and not for me. But it happened. And now we figure out how to live with it, any way we can."

"Oscar—"

"Listen to me," he cut in slowly, "and understand, all right? We all have our different lives. You've got your before and after; I've got my before and after. I've got my life with the old you, I've got my life with the new you, I've got the life I let myself dream about…" He shook his head. "None of those are the same thing. Understand? None of them exist simultaneously because none of them _can_. They are all separate parts of me because they _have_ to be, because I need it that way to keep going."

"But…" She could fear tears pulling at her throat again, clawing their way to the top. She did not want to think of him like this; she did not want him to have to _be_ like this. "There's only one you, Oscar. There can only be one of you."

"No, there can be as many mes as I need there to be to survive." He smiled thinly, and tipped his head towards her, as if in gratitude. "You taught me that. You were very good at compartmentalizing, by the way—even before you cheated with ZIP." He smiled as if he were teasing her, as if she could remember. As if this were a joke. "You had everything and everyone locked away in their perfect little boxes before you went under…"

"And you?" she asked. She didn't want to hear about herself anymore. She, for once, was sick of hearing about who she used to be. If she heard anymore, she _would_ be sick. "What about you? Did you have your perfect little boxes before I went under too?"

Though she expected him to, he did not smile with his previous dark humor. He did not make an ugly joke. Instead, he bent forward, and pressed a very light kiss to her bare knee. Then he got up, and sat beside her on the bed. He did not touch her, did not move towards her. After a few seconds, when she reached over and took his hand, squeezing it tight in comfort and solidarity, he forced some semblance of a tender smile, and spoke.

"I tried," he whispered, finally answering her question. "I tried to… to have my house in order before you went. I attempted to make my peace with this, with our past and future, and I…" He turned to look at her, a rueful smile on his lips. "Well, it's my own fault I let things blend together. I should've been more disciplined."

She tilted her head, equally intrigued and concerned. "What do you mean?"

With his free hand, he pointed at the left side of her neck. "Do you ever look closely at that tattoo?"

She frowned, reflexively touching the bird inked there. "You saw the journal," she reminded him. "I look closely at everything."

He spared a quick smile, and tightened his fingers around hers briefly. "Yes, I know. But…" He paused a moment, and then looked behind them. The journal was on the far side of the bed, where she'd tossed it earlier, but with his long arms, he was able to reach it without leaving her. He straightened back up, and she released his hand so he could flip through the little sketchbook. It only took him a couple seconds to find the page containing the drawings of her neck tattoo. There was one large reproduction of it in the center of the page, and then smaller details drawn in all around it.

He set the journal in her hands.

"Notice anything?" he asked quietly.

She shook her head, her eyes scanning the page for what had to be the thousandth time. "I… I don't know what you want me to look for," she muttered after a minute, growing frustrated. "We haven't decoded this one yet; I don't know what it means, I—"

"That's okay," he interrupted soothingly. "You don't need to decode it to see what I left you there."

Her head jerked up at the mention, her eyes flying to his.

He tried for a little smile. "This isn't a revelation, is it? You told me you remembered—"

"Remembered you drawing it, yes," she whispered. "But what did you leave for me?" She stared hard at him, and then hard at the drawing, struggling to see what she had apparently never seen before, struggling to see what it was he could've left her, in so simple and stark a design. She focused on the large bird first, peering at the shading she'd drawn in, trying to see if there was some pattern there, or letters, or numbers. Had he written something in code for her? Perhaps the trajectory of the bird was a hint. Perhaps its molting feather meant something. Perhaps—

It was then, as she was turning the journal to the side peer at one of the smaller detail sketches of one of the large bird's wings, that she noticed a different drawing. It was a close-up of the clutch of smaller birds, set off to the side from the main illustration. She glanced at them briefly, and seeing nothing there, and was about to look away and search elsewhere when she realized. Her mouth suddenly felt very dry as she stared down at the image.

"There are three of them," she said.

Oscar nodded at her side. He did not press for her to explain the symbolism and she did not offer to speak it aloud. He, after all, had begged her just a moment ago not to talk of this.

"Did you notice the direction the birds are flying in?" he asked quietly.

She nodded, and understood. One bird was diving straight down, parting from the other two. She knew what that meant. And the two up top…

"They're at the same level," Jane whispered. "But one's flying forward and, and one's flying backward." She felt her chin start to shake. "Who's who?" she whispered, turning to Oscar, her voice rising with desperation. "Which of us is going forward, which one back? What does it mean?"

He shook his head, his eyes falling to the journal in her hands. "I don't know," he whispered.

"You have to know!" she protested, shoving the journal at him. "You drew it! Look at it and tell me, tell me when we're going to split up! Tell me who's going where! Tell me what it means!"

"I don't know," he repeated, and she could hear the strain in his voice too now. "It was just an idea. Just a—a concept. And half the time I wasn't even sure about the particulars, I wasn't even sure if it was me and you up top in my head, or—"

"Who else could it be?" Jane cut in desperately. She shoved a finger at the drawing. "The one diving away, that's—that's the baby, right? It has to be. So the other two have to be us, the other two—"

"Or the one diving away is you, leaving us," Oscar interrupted quietly. "Or it's me, letting you go, letting both of you go." He shook his head. "I never could settle," he whispered hoarsely, and she watched the skin at the corners of his eyes grow red again. "I never could decide what was worse, what was better. And then the first day of the procedure came, and I… Well, I gave the tattoo artists what I had. I needed to leave you with something, anything, even if it didn't make complete sense."

Jane shook her head at his explanation, her entire body starting to shake now as she struggled to swallow the truth. How was it possible that he, who was supposed to know everything, didn't have an answer to this? How was it possible that he could not even explain what he himself had created? Was there not one ounce of fairness left in the world for her—for _them_?

By the time she realized she was sobbing, he'd already wrapped his arms around her. She shook and pressed herself into him, seeking his warmth and solidity, anything that was firm and upright, so she could keep try to keep her head above water. She could feel his face burying itself into her neck, could feel the scratch of his stubble and the wet warmth of his lips when he kissed the secret he'd left behind for her.

"Why did you let me go?" she cried, hugging him tighter, driving her forehead into his shoulder. "Why did you let me do this to us?"

His arms tightened around her, squeezing so hard she could barely breathe, but she didn't care. She could taste his kiss, and his cold sorrow, against the goodbye he'd etched into her skin.

"I don't know," he whispered back. "Jane, I don't know."

That answer, finally, she accepted immediately. Its horrid honesty was beyond reproach.

* * *

 **A/N** : Somehow this got even darker than I originally intended? But let's be honest, how does O function in real life? Guy's made of sterner stuff than me, I'll tell you that. Thank you for reading! Reviews would be very, very lovely if you have thoughts.


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